"Sunday night’s Video Music Awards, though, were something different — not theatrics as a way of communicating some new vision of pop, but the reduction of pop to playfully dressing up in other people’s visions. It was less like a collision or symbiosis between theater and music, and more like a warning: The dress-up and drama could swallow that balance whole. To the point where pop stars, instead of inventing styles and aesthetics and bravely showing them to the world on TV, are just putting strange things on their heads and doing the kind of variety-show theatrics that audiences have to build back together into something meaningful."
— NY Mag
